


Crocuta

by Skull4601 (shiplizard)



Series: No sister of her mother's womb [1]
Category: Pitch Black (2000)
Genre: Abuse of biology, Abuse of symbolism, F/M, Fanboy tears of pain, Gen, Genderqueer, Prophecy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-09
Updated: 2011-11-09
Packaged: 2017-10-25 21:08:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/274804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiplizard/pseuds/Skull4601
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A young Furyan couple ask an Elemental oracle about their daughter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crocuta

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by discussions with [Binz](http://archiveofourown.org/users/binz/pseuds/binz), who points out that there's a very strong narrative attached to three women travelling with a holy man.

They said that Furyans were merciless killers who would eat the hearts of their enemies. This was true. In a pinch, they would eat the rest as well.

They said that a Furyan could hear you if he could not see you, and smell you if he could not hear you, and would know your fear from the smelling. This was true. They could likely also tell what planet you'd been born on, and what you'd had for dinner.

They said that if you cut off a Furyan's limbs that he would still fight, and that he could break your bones with his teeth, and this was also true.

They said that Furyans were half animal, and this was partially true and accounted for the rest of the things that they said.

They did not say what animal Furyans were half of, and they did not say that it had made some very strange changes in the notorious warcult's people, that integration of that feral DNA from old Earth. A biologist might have guessed if he had met a pregnant Furyan woman, but one thing that they did not say (but that was true) was that if you met a pregnant Furyan woman it was very likely the last thing you'd ever do. It was a secret that they kept, the Furyans, for reasons of their own, and let the rest of the galaxy misunderstand.

* * *

So it was with Ehren of Furya. The child the med-techs had seen that day in her womb would be her first, as well as the first for her husband Kifo.

"It will be a girl," she said, with some pride. "I feel the rage of her already."

Girl children were needy, it was understood. They often came late, angry into the world; they were larger and stronger than their brothers, asked for more hate and vitality from their mothers, and it was a medically accepted thing that the more violence the mother offered the world during her pregnancy, the larger and stronger her girlchild would be.

Kifo, practical and very fond of his wife, asked: "But what did they say about you?"

"They said it would not be an easy birth, my first to be a girl," his wife admitted. "She will likely need to be cut from me."

"Then I will cut her from you when the time comes," Kifo said firmly. "My knives as sharp as scalpels."

Ehren beamed at him. It was a traditional thing, and a good one. A generations old sign that her husband did not fear the sight of blood-- not that she would have expected that from him, he who had fought for her attentions in bloody combat in the streets of the capital. And his knives were sharp as scalpels, and he wielded them like living things. It was one of the first things about him that had charmed her-- along with his dark beauty and his mane of sleek black hair, all of which she hoped their child inherited.

"Then we only have to decide what to name her."

 

* * *

 

Six months along, Ehren's patience with her pregnancy was at its lowest eb. The med-techs talked about the rush of androgens that were strengthening the life inside her. Kifo's father took him hunting and talked more frankly.

"They're hell, when it's a girl. If they don't want to kill you they want to fuck you. Don't tell your mother, but I'm glad you were a boy."

Kifo had no time to answer; a hell-bore broke cover and came for them slavering and he freed his knives and dove on it.

But he kept it in mind.

It was in his mind when he came home and Ehren threw him against the wall snarling and drank the taste of blood out of his mouth. It was in his mind the next day when a small slight from a couple that they were not even particularly friendly with ended with the other woman's dislocated jaw and two fist-size holes in the duracrete wall of their house.

The med techs patted him on the shoulder and promised that their first child was doing wonderfully, and that this was all to be expected

It was in his mind when she made up hers.

"I am going to Altair."

It was a lawless place, a den of hardened refugees and exiles, and the fighting ring there was painted red with the blood of those who failed.

"Stay home," he urged, quietly, though he knew he could not sway her in this mood. He looked at her under his long lashes, offered her his graceful hands, knowing that all her rage would not mean that she hurt him meaninglessly. She growled and her arm was tight and hard under his touch. "Ehren. Nobody doubts that she'll be perfect."

"I want to murder someone."

"But you're-" _you have never been graceful. You are strong, you can break a rival with your two hands, but you have never been graceful, and now you're pregnant. Your stomach is wider than your hips, you ache in the morning, your feet are swollen. I'm worried about you. I'm worried about the baby._

She fixed him with a dour glare. Her eyes were a cold gray that was almost silver; death-seeing eyes, people called them, and they were considered a mark of great attractiveness among their people. He'd always found them beautiful. That and her massive size and golden skin and her laugh in battle, all of which he hoped their child inherited.

"Kifo. Just the once," she said, firmly. "An old friend of mine is coming to Furya soon, an oracle, and I want hir to read the baby's fortune in the blood of my enemies."

He let her go, but he didn't sleep until she was home two weeks later, bruised and exhausted and bearing the artifacts of the last champion of the ring in a stasis-box. She came unsteadily into his arms as soon as she was cleared by the meds to return home, and they slept for two days in each other's embrace. A report on the continued health of their child was waiting when they woke up, but secretly Kifo was already at peace. If the worst had come to pass, they could have tried again, so long as Ehren was safe. The house was quiet again, and Ehren was only a little homicidal as they waited for the oracle of their child.

"Her name will be Mankiller," Ehren said, smiling down at their tangled hands atop her stomach. This was nothing overtly portentous. The number of Furyan girls named some variant of Mankiller or some old Earth word for Deathbringer was only second in number to the ones named something that translated out to Vengeance, or-- like Ehren-- Honor. And that was a significant piece of the population.

* * *

Karyptis was a water elemental; neither man nor woman, neither human nor not human. Sie had known Ehren's mother and her mother's mother, and sie was very fond of the young woman.

They say Elementals can see the future in the disorder of the present, and this is true.

They say that this knowledge comes at a cost; no Elemental can know what will happen if they try to change the future. This, too, is often true. The predictions of what was to come must be read as if you peer into a still, deep pond; the slightest breath upon the surface will take the image away.

Karyptis had seen the future, and hir heart was heavy when she came to Furya.

"I will read your child's oracle," sie said somberly to hir eager young friend, and invited her to hir chambers. Sie met Ehren's handsome young husband without the joy sie might have felt, and the lack of it was heavy.

Ehren gave her the heart and boiled skull of her enemy, and Karyptis nodded over them.

"Have I told you about chaos?" sie asked, tracing a finger across the white bone.

"Once, when you got drunk after the battle of Aquila Minor," Ehren said cheerfully. “I was seventeen; didn’t understand a word.”

"There are pictures in disorder. Things that may be." Karyptis focused on the skull, the lines and grooves and micro-scale pores in the bone. "But the slightest shift in action changes the picture entirely. Drift an atom's width from your beginning; arrive light-years from your destination. Give me the heart."

Sie held it aloft, and squeezed; dark blood ran from hir fingers, dripped trails down the skull, and the lines of it, the paths it took and did not take, told hir what sie already knew.

"I will tell you what is certain. Your child will be beautiful. With her father's black hair and pretty features and grace; with her mother's strong frame and brutal speed. This much is already genetic fact." The elemental's eyes drifted from the father-- dusky-skinned, dark-eyed, hair pinned back with the venom-spines of terrorsaurs that he had surely killed himself. Slender muscles and the soft curves of a Furyan man, denied the double-dose of testosterone that his sisters had received. Now the mother-- broad-shouldered and large-handed, the bones of her enemies plaited in her golden-brown beard, no lines on her young face, no worry marring her pale gold skin, everything that was Mother of the species. Their child would be all that they had hoped.

"Now there are two paths. If the droplet falls in the first breath; the future bends one way. A picosecond of hesitation and it flies back like a whip into a different pattern."

Karyptis looked at hir friend with sorrow, because Ehren's answer was already written in the very patterns of the air, but sie had, just once, to try.

"If you leave the planet tonight, take your husband and run like cowards, your daughter will be raised in dishonor, live a quiet life. With her family. Possibly she'll have a brother. This is all I can see."

The mother scoffed, the father looked offended.

"Or stay. And fight. The comet is coming. And this will be your daughter's future." Karyptis shut hir eyes. "She will be born alone in blood, and die in triumph and glory. She will have her father's eyes, and her mother's. She will be offered despair and she will repay it with hate. No prison will hold her, no enemy will stay her.

She will have no siblings but meet a sister not of her mother's womb. She will have no children but meet a daughter not of her body. She will not know your gods but she will go on pilgrimage with a holy man.

Her strength will fail. Her sister will die.

Her strength will fail. The holy man will die.

Her strength will fail. Her daughter will die.

Then in her grief she will burn your enemies from the fabric of all creation, and hell will open for her to walk into."

The elemental opened hir eyes again. Ehren and Kifo stared at hir, their hands linked, knuckles white.

"You are my friend, Ehren. Leave the planet tonight," Karyptis sighed, and then fell apart into mist and dissipated back to hir borrowed rooms because sie did not want to say goodbye to the daughter's daughter of an old friend, and the memory of Ehren's death written in hir numerical projections made hir sick at heart.

* * *

"We could go," Ehren said, and it was not true.

"We could," Kifo said, and knew they would not.

* * *

The comet came. Ehren, nine months gravid, died in the street atop a pile of her slaughtered foes, and it was not her husband's knives that bit into her belly but the dull, ragged blade of a Necromonger soldier. Kifo died when he tried to save his daughter; disintegrated by a particle beam mid-leap.

Little Mankiller was throttled and discarded, and every child like her, and the comet left again.

* * *

The first salvage crew brave enough to set foot on Furya two days later found it a shell of a world, gutted and burning.

"Think any of them got offworld?" said the ore specialist, turning in a circle.

"Those stubborn fuckers? They'd think it was dishonorable," said the one who doubled as mechanic and fence.

"They like revenge, though," the ore specialist pointed out darkly. “Hell, look at this blast pattern. This was some kind of small-scale planet-razer. Whoever did this wanted everything toasted.”

“Shocker,” said the mechanic.

The Furyans, as a people, would not be missed.

The mechanic drifted away, then, poking through the rubble; he found a dumpster that had fallen shut and protected its contents from the blast; he looked inside out of morbid curiosity and then swore blasphemously and jumped backward.

"What's wrong, tech-ops?" said his partner with a sigh. "You skittish pussy,"

"There's a fucking kid in here is what's fucking wrong, ore-ops," the mechanic said angrily, and scrambled back up to the rim of the container, reaching in with a look of horror. "Oh Jesus Christ, it's alive."

"You're shitting me." But even through his haz-suit he could hear the soft, exhausted wailing. "Mary and Joseph too. Hey, Computer."

"Computer standing by," the brain onboard his ship said from the suit-speaker right by his ear, the pleasant modulated voice all kinds of wrong for the tomb of a world they were standing on.

"Procedure for minor child in salvage claim?"

"Processing." There was a long pause. "Enter child name for record. Present child to government care."

"It's a baby, it doesn't have a nametag on," the mechanic said shortly. "And the local government is all fucking dead."

"Processing." Another pause. Cheap-ass AI. "Nearest government foster program on Scylla, two lightyears away. Enter child name."

"Tech-ops, is it a boy or a girl?" the ore specialist said.

The mechanic, who didn't know about Furyans, looked at the baby worriedly. "Boy. Okay. Okay. Computer: popular boy's names, first and middle."

"Processing. By random selection of top hundred Earth male names. Richard Bradley. Require last name."

"You found him, tech-ops, he's your problem," the ore specialist said helpfully. "Give him yours."

"Fine. You asshole." David Riddick tucked little Mankiller under his arm, as carefully as he knew how, and carried her into a future written in blood.

**Author's Note:**

> C. Crocutus, the spotted hyena, is the largest of all the bone-cracking hyenas. As its name implies, it has jaws strong enough (and a digestive system robust enough) to eat bone. They are ferocious and highly intelligent predators who, despite their reputation, in fact hunt more than they scavenge.
> 
> The spotted hyena lives in large matriarchal packs. The female hyena is 10-12% larger than her male counterpart. Due to her higher level of testosterone during her childhood, her clitoris is enlargened into a pseudopenis almost identical to the male's, through which she mates and gives birth. Her labial folds grow together into a mass resembling a scrotal sac.


End file.
